Comment by dang
5 years ago
Sorry, but this strikes me as classic hindsight fallacy. Here's Fred Wilson in 2011: https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/, and the original email thread between him and PG from 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html. PG went all the way to using an exclamation mark (has there ever been another?) and even that wasn't enough.
Anyone who thinks VCs would have been happy to fund a Couchsurfing knock-off in 2008 is looking at this history through many filters, for example the fact that startup fundraising became much easier in the subsequent decade.
The reason I strongly disagree is that I was intimately involved in the VR (vacation rental) space at that time. I have seen those articles before, and yes, both Fred Wilson and pg missed seeing the potential benefit, but in my opinion despite their phenomenal success otherwise, this "miss" here was just the miss in their minds, not the space more broadly.
My understanding is that one of the first big investors in AirBnB did so because he was familiar with the VR space. Being very familiar with the holes in user experience and technology at the time with VR websites, it was not a leap in my mind at all to see how a winner was destined for the space.
Ah, this context makes things clearer—and is quite interesting! I think we may have been talking at cross purposes. I was talking about the mind-misses.